Badlands Director Reveals The Biggest Challenge Of Making The Movie [Exclusive]

“Predator: Badlands” is the third “Predator” movie that Dan Trachtenberg has directed so far. He and Joshua Wassung also co-helmed the acclaimed animated film “Predator: Killer of Killers,” which came out earlier this year, after Trachtenberg initially caused a stir with 2022’s “Prey,” a movie set in the early 18th century. Each one of Trachtenberg’s “Predator” films has been novel or creative, providing a rather simple franchise with far more personality than it previously had. “Badlands,” in particular, feels like the result of Trachtenberg trying to effectively dramatize a painting one might see on the cover of a pulp novel from 1980.

The film features no human characters and is set on a distant, monster-populated planet called Genna. Its lead character, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), is a member of the Yautja, a species devoted to hunting and combat. Dek is on Gemma to hunt a notoriously unkillable creature known as The Kalisk, a cross between King Kong and a porcupine. During his mission, Dek gains a robot companion named Thia (Elle Fanning), who came to Gemma on a biological mission but was ripped in half and left for dead. Most of the movie features Dek carrying Thia’s top half around on his back. Dek is also joined by an indestructible miniature space ape that Thia names Bud. The film is lousy with creatures, alien flora, and weird extraterrestrial landscapes.

Indeed, “Badlands” features even more special effects than most modern Hollywood blockbusters. Dek’s alien face required facial animation throughout the film, and every shot features an animated creature, a living tree, or some other VFX flourish. Recently, /Film’s own Bill Bria spoke with Trachtenberg, and the director revealed that the sheer volume of VFX in “Predator: Badlands” posed a unique challenge for him: He had never handled that much before.

Trachtenberg came right out and admitted that the VFX on “Predator: Badlands” were incredibly taxing to envision during filming. As he put it:

“The biggest filmmaking challenge on ‘Badlands’ was absolutely the amount of visual effects. There’s maybe 10 to 15 shots that aren’t visual effects in the entire movie, and especially when the main character, the heart of the story, includes visual effects — and by the way, his buddy also includes visual effects. So, when you’re cutting a movie, when you’re putting it together, you hope to start to let what it actually is really speak to you. And when you’re on set, you have to use your imagination a lot, like, ‘This is going to eventually feel like this or that.'”

The director also noted that he and his cast and crew had to merely picture how good the film would turn out. In fact, it wasn’t until Trachtenberg saw his VFX team’s finished handiwork that he really knew what the movie was even going to look like. He was also concerned that his lead actor’s performance would be altered by the addition of an animated Yautja face. It was, but in a way that, according to Trachtenberg, was for the better:

“Demetrius’ face was in the movie for a very, very, very long time, and he was delivering an incredible performance, and we all bonded to it in a specific way. And then we started to get Dek’s face in, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, the nature of the scene feels so different. It feels this way or that.'”

The visual effects are great in “Badlands,” but in a rich, exciting way. See for yourself when the film hits theaters on November 7, 2025.